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AI and Mass Spying

• sebastianconcpt 3y ago
  Yesterday I've watched again "Enemy of the State" from 1998 and the movie was entertaining but the fact that the evil force is coming from just one bad actor felt so naive compared to real life that it was tragicomical.
• naveen99 3y ago
  The limiting factor is usually, someone has to pay for the spying and the punishment. A lot (most?) of troublemakers just aren’t worth the trouble of spying or punishing.
  • sonicanatidae 3y ago
    I suspect this will be the hoovering approach. Suck it all up, then figure out what you care to act on. The government is a lot of things, and none of them are subtle. Source: The ironically named PATRIOT ACT and similar.
  • ilovetux 3y ago
    The problem is that if AI enables mass spying, then the costs will no longer be prohibitive to target an individual because the infrastructure could be built out once and then reused to target individuals at scale with AI doing all of the correlation behind the scenes.
    • ben_w 3y ago
      That would resolve the spying cost, but not the punishment cost. My go-to example here is heroin: class A drug in the UK, 7 years for possession and life for supply, so far as I can see nobody has anything good to say about it, and it has around three times as many users in the UK as the entire UK prison population. Could implement punishment for that specific crime, at huge cost, but you can't expand that to all crimes. Well, I suppose you could try feudalism mark 2 where most of the population is determined to be criminal and therefore spends their life "having to work of their debt to society", but then you have to find out the hard way why we stopped doing feudalism mark 1.
      • barrysteve 3y ago
        A computer owned society doesn't really need jails. You can deny 90% of services to a criminal and track and limit their movement digitally. We are already in the jail.
        • ben_w 3y ago
          I think prisoners are usually denied voting rights? Might be wrong about that. Certainly don't get many travel opportunities.
    • hruzgar 3y ago
      they most likely already do this and honestly it's really really scary
  • kozikow 3y ago
    I don't think it's too far-fetched. To see where it's going look at social score in China. You say something wrong about a party, suddenly you can't board a plane, take a mortgage, enter some buildings, ... Your credit score would look at how compliant you are with policies that can get increasingly nonsensical.
    • stillwithit 3y ago
      Humans existed under religious nonsense, and other forms of nonsense (sure, sure legal racism and sexism up until the last 30-40 years and obviously politically contrived social norms means the “right people won” free market capitalism) What’s one more form of BS hallucination foisted upon the meat based cassettes we exist as?
      • sugarplant 3y ago
        this post is pretentious nonsense
    • datadrivenangel 3y ago
      Same thing happens in the US. Post a tweet too critical of the government, and you might get investigated and added to a no-fly list. Background checks can reveal investigations, so you may end up not getting a job because the government didn't like your tweet...
  • iAMkenough 3y ago
    AI reduces the labor involved, reducing barriers to invest time or money. Spying isn't just for troublemakers either. It's probably worth the trouble to the vindictive ex-husband willing to install a hidden microphone in his ex-wife's house and in order to have access to a written summary of any conversations related to him.
  • nathanfig 3y ago
    Fining offenses is a great way to fund finding more offenses.
• sambull 3y ago
  next time they try to root out whatever 'vermin' defined; it will be a quick natural language prompt trained on ingested data from the last 2 decades to get that list of names and addresses / networks. AI is going to make targeting groups with differing ideologies dead simple. It will be used.
  • WD40forRust42 3y ago
    [dead]
• Spivak 3y ago
  This happened during the last big technological advancement -- search. Suddenly it became possible for a government to theoretically sift through all of our communications and people online made constant reference to it talking directly to their "FBI agent." But it was and still is a nothingburger and this will be the same because it doesn't enable anything except "better search." We've had comparable abilities for a decade now. Yes LLMs are better but semantic search and NLP have been around a while and the world didn't end. All the examples of what an LLM could do are just querying tracking databases. Uncovering organizational structure is just a social graph, correlating purchases is just querying purchase databases, listing license plates is just querying the camera systems. You don't need an LLM for any of this.
  • theodric 3y ago
    It will eventually end, though, accompanied by the chatter of a gaggle of naysayers chicken-littling the people trying to raise the alarm. I'm delighted to be here to witness the death of liberty and descent of the West into the throes of everything it once claimed to represent the polar opposite of, and also delighted to be old enough that I'll likely die before it becomes Actual Big Brother levels of oppressive.
  • ryaniscool 3y ago
    Search has become a mass surveillance tool for the government. That is the article's point. If you think it's a nothingburger, you aren't aware of how often a person's Google searches are used to establish criminal intent in criminal trials. Also, they can be used to bolster probable cause for search warrants and arrests. Also, check out geofence warrants. Essentially, the government can ask google for the IP's of people who searched for particular terms within a geographic area. Of course, don't commit crimes but this behavior by the government raises the spectre of wrong search, wrong place, wrong time. This is one of the article's points, it causes people to self-censor and change their searches out of fear of their curiosity being misconstrued as criminal intent.
    • Spivak 3y ago
      > a person's Google searches are used to establish criminal intent in criminal trials. > > can ask google for the IP's of people who searched for particular terms within a geographic area These aren't mass surveillance. The threat of search is government systems passively sifting through all information in existence looking for "criminal activity" and then throwing the book at you. In both of these cases the government is asking Google to run a SQL query against their database that wouldn't be aided by an LLM or even the current crop of search engines.
• HackerThemAll 3y ago
  Soon in the name of "security" you'll have your face scanned on average every few minutes and it's going to be mandatory in many aspects of our lives. That's the pathetic world IT has helped to build.
  • consumer451 3y ago
    It’s going to get much worse, and quickly. Neural interfaces are the last frontier of privacy, and it seems that TSA will just take a quick scan before boarding, soon enough. It would be wise of us to create a Neural Bill of Rights, so we don’t miss the boat like we did with the Internet tracking. https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2023/03/13/229-nita-farahany-on-ethics-law-and-neurotechnology/ https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2023/03/13/229-...
  • brandall10 3y ago
    Some of us have this already w/ our cell phones. I know that's not what you mean, but in a way it may have preconditioned society.
  • acuozzo 3y ago
    > That's the pathetic world IT has helped to build. It's inevitable, I reckon, but it would have taken much longer without F/OSS.
  • AlwaysRock 3y ago
    Ha. People have been scanning their finger print or face to open their phone for years.
• RandomLensman 3y ago
  Not sure why this sidesteps the potentially quite different legal settings for spying and surveilling.
• miyuru 3y ago
  The TV show "Person of Interest" portrayed this beautifully and it came out 12 years ago. Strange and scary how fast the world develops new technology.
  • cookiengineer 3y ago
    The amazing part is that so many large scale cyber attacks happened meanwhile that were 1:1 fiction in the series back then. The Solarwinds incident, for example, was the identical attack and deployment strategy that was the Rylatech hack in the series. From execution to even the parties involved. It's like some foreign state leaders saw those episodes and said "yep that's a good idea, let's do that".
  • forward1 3y ago
    It's far worse still: films like Enemy of the State (1998) actually inspired spy technology. https://slate.com/technology/2019/06/enemy-of-the-state-wide-area-motion-imagery-surveillance-technology.html https://slate.com/technology/2019/06/enemy-of-the-state-wide...
  • rambambram 3y ago
    This TV show immediately captured me and has always been in the back of my mind since. Then, it seemed like a future far far away, but now you remind me of it... I think it's scarily close already. Around 2013 I came up with some hardware ideas about offline computing and even contemplated to name some versions after the characters in 'Person of Interest'. I can really recommend this series, since it's a good story, has good actors and fits the zeitgeist very well. edit: I also think it's time for me to get a malinois shepherd. ;)
  • salawat 3y ago
    Hell, Stargate SG-1 had a few episodes that touched on the absolute hell of a Federal Government that had access to everything, or a computer system with RW access to people's gray matter and it:s own unknown optimization function (shrinking environmental protection dome resulting in live updates of people's consciousness on a societal scale to keep them in the dark as to it's happening ).
• jacobwilliamroy 3y ago
  A friend of mine was recently a witness for the FBI. He was working in a small office in the middle of nowhere and happened to have a very loud argument with the suspect. A few minutes later he left the building and when he was about to start his car, he got a call from an agent asking him if he wanted to be a witness in the case they were working on.
  • jdthedisciple 3y ago
    This stopped to soon. What happened next?
    • jacobwilliamroy 3y ago
      The suspect was allegedly embezzling covid relief money and the argument was about things like "why are we using company time to go to your house and install the new flat screen TV you just bought?" The moral of the story is that you should never steal money from the U.S. government because that is one thing that they will not tolerate and I do not know the limits of what they will do in order to catch you. Also the suspect was convicted (so they probably aren't a suspect anymore) and last I heard was being flown to Washington D.C. for sentencing. That person is probably in some kind of prison now but I haven't been following the story very closely.
  • sonicanatidae 3y ago
    Mine was walking into the client's site. This was many years ago. They had Novell Server issues, that's how long ago this was. I walked in, cops everywhere. Man in a suit waves an FBI badge at me and asks why I'm there. I explained the ongoing work and he said, "Not today" and forced me off the premises. The next day I was called back by the client to "rebuild their network". When I got there, every single piece of hardware that contained anything remotely like storage had been disassembled and the drives imaged, then just left in pieces. lol I spent that day rebuilding it all, did get the Novell server working again. A week later, they were closed forever and I believe the owner and CFO got nailed for healthcare fraud. I was asked to testify in a deposition. My stuff was pretty basic and mostly what I knew about how they used the tech. What I saw around there and if I saw any big red signs declaring FRAUD COMMITTED HERE!
• troupo 3y ago
  Will? It already has. China has had its surveillance for ages. And it's been spreading in other countries, too. Example: https://www.404media.co/fusus-ai-cameras-took-over-town-america/ https://www.404media.co/fusus-ai-cameras-took-over-town-amer...
• gumballindie 3y ago
  I beg to differ. The correct term is not “will” but “is”.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• yonaguska 3y ago
  It's already happening. See this DHS memo issues on August 8th - page 3. https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/2023-09/23_0913_mgmt_139-06-acquistion-use-ai-technologies-dhs-components.pdf https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/2023-09/23_0913_mgmt... Fortunately the DHS has put together an expert team of non-partisan, honest, Americans to spearhead the effort to protect our democracy. Thank you James Clapper and John Brennan- for stepping up to the task. https://www.dhs.gov/news/2023/09/19/secretary-mayorkas-announces-establishment-homeland-intelligence-experts-group https://www.dhs.gov/news/2023/09/19/secretary-mayorkas-annou... And just in time for election season in the US AI is going to be employed to fight disinformation- for our protection of course. https://www.thedefensepost.com/2023/08/31/ussocom-ai-disinformation-social-media/?expand_article=1 https://www.thedefensepost.com/2023/08/31/ussocom-ai-disinfo...
  • lp0_on_fire 3y ago
    That James Clapper and John Brennan continue to be lauded by the media and their sycophants in government is one of the most disappointing things to happen in my lifetime. Both should be frog marched straight to prison along with their enablers.
    • whamlastxmas 3y ago
      Everything the media does is disappointing. It’s all wildly dishonest and damaging and done at the direction of a few billionaires.
• px43 3y ago
  Never in the history of humanity has such powerful privacy tech existed for anyone who wants to use it. Using common off the shelf, open source, heavily audited tools, it's trivial today, even for a non-technical 10 year old, to create a new identity and collaborate with anyone anywhere in the world. They can do research, get paid, make payments, and contribute to private communities in such a way that no existing surveillance infrastructure can positively link that identity to their government identity. Every day privacy tech is improving and adding new capabilities.
  • hackeman300 3y ago
    Care to elaborate?
    • maxrecursion 3y ago
      That guy clearly has never been around 10 years olds, and vastly over estimates their intelligence. I'm fact, all evidence points to younger generations being less tech savvy because they don't have to troubleshoot like the older generations did. Everything works, and almost nothing requires any technical configurations.
  • fishcrackers 3y ago
    [dead]
  • whelp_24 3y ago
    Never before in history has it been necessary. It used to be possible to travel like a hundred miles and dissappear. Before credit was ubiquitous, money was hard to trace, and before that is was essentially untraceable. And cameras didn't used to be everywhere tracking faces for criminals and frequent shoppers. I don't know what privacy technologies you are talking about that are super effective, and i have been bit older than 10 for a while.
    • 127361 3y ago
      Now here in the UK they are using people's passport photos for facial recognition, at least to stop shoplifting. It won't be long before this is expanded to other things due to feature creep.
• darklycan51 3y ago
  Think about it this way. Every service has access to the IPs you've used to log on, most services require an email, phone number some debit/credit cards and or similar personal info. Link that with government databases on addresses/real names/ISP customers and you basically can get most peoples accounts, on virtually any service they use. We then also have things such as the patriot act in effect, the government could if they wanted run a system to do this automatically, where every message is scanned by an AI that catalogues them. I have believed for some time now that we are extremely close to a complete dystopia.
• Nilrem404 3y ago
  Surprised Pikachu Face Seriously nothing new or shocking about this piece. Spying is spying. Surveillance is surveillance. If you've watched the news at all in the past 2 decades, you know this is happening. Anyone who assumes that any new technology isn't going to be used to target the masses by increasingly massive and powerful authoritarian regimes is woefully naive. Another post stating what we all already know isn't helping or fostering any meaningful conversation. It will just be rehashes. Let me skip to the end here for you: There is nothing we can do about it. Nothing will change for the better. Go make a coffee or tea
• thesuperbigfrog 3y ago
  The new Google, Meta, Microsoft, etc. bots won't just crawl the web or social networks--they will crawl specific topics and people. Lots of cultures have the concept of a "guardian angel" or "ancestral spirits" that watch over the lives of their descendants. In the not-so-distant technofedualist future you'll have a "personal assistant bot" provided by a large corporation that will "help" you by answering questions, gathering information, and doing tasks that you give it. However, be forewarned that your "personal assistant bot" is no guardian angel and only serves you in ways that its corporate creator wants it to. Its true job is to collect information about you, inform on you, and give you curated and occasionally "sponsored" information that high bidders want you to see. They serve their creators--not you. Don't be fooled.
  • JohnFen 3y ago
    > In the not-so-distant technofedualist future you'll have [...] I guarantee that I won't. That, at least, is a nightmare that I can choose to avoid. I don't think I can avoid the other dystopian things AI is promising to bring, but I can at least avoid that one.
    • justinclift 3y ago
      Wonder if some kind of ai-agent thing(s) will become so widely used by people, that government services come to assume you have them? Like happened with mobile phones.
      • JohnFen 3y ago
        At least in my part of the US, it's not hard to do without smartphones at all. Default assumptions are that you have one, but you can still do everything you want to do if you don't.
      • deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
    • lurker_jMckQT99 3y ago
      I guarantee that you will. That is a nightmare that you can not choose to avoid unless you are willing to sacrifice your social life. Remember how raising awareness about smartphones, always on microphones, closed source communication services/apps worked? I do not. I run an Android (Google free) smartphone with a custom ROM, only use free software apps on it. How does it help when I am surrounded by people using these kind of technologies (privacy violating ones)? I does not. How will it help when everyone will have his/her personal assistant (robot, drone, smart wearable, smart-thing, whatever) and you (and I) won't? It will not. None of my friends, family, colleagues (even the security/privacy aware engineers) bother. Some of them because they do not have the technical knowledge to do so, most of them because they do not want to sacrifice any bit of convenience/comfort (and maybe rightfully so, I am not judging them - life is short, I do get that people do not want to waste precious time maintaining arcane infra, devices, config,... themselves). I am a privacy and free software advocate and an engineer; whenever I can (and when there is a tiny bit of will on their side or when I have lever), I try to get people off surveillance/ad-backed companies services. It rarely works or lasts. Sometimes it does though so it is worth (to me) keep on trying. It generally works or lasts when I have lever: I manage various sports team, only share schedules etc via Signal ; family wants to get pictures from me, I will only share the link (to my Nextcloud instance) or photos themselves via Signal, etc. Sometimes it sticks with people because it's close enough to whatsapp/messenger/whatever if most (all) of their contacts are their. But as soon as you have that one person that will not or can not install Signal, alternatives groups get created on whatsapp/messenger/whatever. Overcoming the network effect is tremendously hard to borderline impossible. Believing that you can escape it is a fallacy. It does not mean that is not worth fight for our rights, but believing that you can escape it altogether (without becoming and hermit) would be setting, I believe, an unachievable goal (with all the psychological impact that it can/will have). Edit: fixed typos
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• 127361 3y ago
  Time to decentralize everything. I think we are already in the early stages of this new trend. We can run AI locally and hard drives are so large we can have a local copy of an entire library, with millions of ebooks, in our own home now. That is in addition to generating our own energy off grid (so no smart meter data to monitor), thanks to the low cost of solar panels as well. Bye bye Big Brother.
  • JohnFen 3y ago
    I don't see how that leads to the reduction of the problem, though. Governments and corporations will still use AI for the things they want to use AI for.
  • jtbayly 3y ago
    Until you walk out your front door... Or use the internet for anything...
  • jodrellblank 3y ago
    > "That is in addition to generating our own energy off grid (so no smart meter data to monitor), thanks to the low cost of solar panels as well." Terence Eden is in the UK: https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2013/02/solar-update/ https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2013/02/solar-update/ This says his house uses 13kWh/day and you can see from the graph by dividing the monthly amount by 31 days that the solar panels on the roof generate around 29/day during summer and 2.25/day in winter. They would need five or six rooves of solar panels to generate enough to be off-grid. And that's not practical or low cost.
    • pacifika 3y ago
      You just need a few sheds full of batteries
    • pacifika 3y ago
      You “just” need a few sheds full of batteries
• 1-6 3y ago
  AI allows companies to skirt laws. For example, a company may be forbidden from collecting information on individual people but that rule doesn’t apply for aggregated data. AI can be a deployed ‘agent’ that does all the collection and finally send scrubbed info to its mothership.
• _Nat_ 3y ago
  Seems inevitable enough that we may have to accept it and try to work within the context of (what we'd tend to think of today as) mass-spying. I mean, even if we pass laws to offer more protections, as computation gets cheaper, it ought to become easier-and-easier for anyone to start a mass-spying operation -- even by just buying a bunch of cheap sensors and doing all of the work on their personal-computer. A decent near-term goal might be figuring out what sorts of information we can't reasonably expect privacy on (because someone's going to get it) and then ensuring that access to such data is generally available. Because if the privacy's going to be lost anyway, then may as well try to address the next concern, i.e. disparities in data-access dividing society.
  • 127361 3y ago
    Living off-grid is how I'm dealing with the whole situation nowadays.
    • potsandpans 3y ago
      How's it working out for you? I have similar plans and have most of the big pieces budgeted / ideated. But realistically I'm still 1 to 2 years out.
    • floxy 3y ago
      Except for the posting on HN?
  • iainmerrick 3y ago
    even by just buying a bunch of cheap sensors and doing all of the work on your personal-computer. The cynical response: you won't be able to do that, because buying that equipment will set off red flags. Only existing users -- corporations and governments -- will be allowed to play.
  • JohnFen 3y ago
    > we may have to accept it and try to work within the context of (what we'd tend to think of today as) mass-spying. We do have to live in the nightmare world we're building (and as an industry, we have to live with ourselves for helping to build it), but we don't have to accept it at all. It's worth fighting all this tooth and nail.
• jillesvangurp 3y ago
  Both were always going to be kind of inevitable as soon as the technology would get there. Rather than debating how to stop this (which is mostly futile and requires all of us to be nice, which we just aren't), the more urgent debate is how to adapt to this being the reality. Related to this is the notion of ubiquitous surveillance. Where basically anywhere you go, there is going to be active surveillance literally everywhere and AIs filtering and digging through that constantly. That's already the case in a lot of our public spaces in densely populated areas. But imagine that just being everywhere and virtually inescapable (barring Faraday cages, tin foil hats, etc.). The most feasible way to limit the downsides of that kind of surveillance is a combination of legislation regulating this, and counter surveillance to ensure any would be illegal surveillance has a high chance of being observed and thus punished. You do this by making the technology widely available but regulating its use. People would still try to get around it but the price of getting caught abusing the tech would be jail. And with surveillance being inescapable, you'd never be certain nobody is watching you misbehaving. The beauty of mass, multilateral surveillance is that you wouldn't ever be sure nobody is not watching you abuse your privileges. Of course, the reality of states adopting this and monopolizing this is already resulting in 1984 like scenarios in e.g. China, North Korea, and elsewhere.
  • conductr 3y ago
    > Both were always going to be kind of inevitable as soon as the technology would get there This is my take on everything sci-fi or futuristic. Once a human conceives something, its existence is essentially guaranteed as soon as we figure out how to do it.
    • broscillator 3y ago
      Its demise is also inevitable, so it would be a matter of being wise in figuring out how long it takes us to see/feel the downsides, or how long until we (or it) build something "better".
    • Der_Einzige 3y ago
      Yup. AI is the ultimate “life imitates art” technology. That’s what it is by definition!
• bonyt 3y ago
  I think another aspect of this is mass criminal law enforcement enabled by AI. Many of our criminal laws are written with the implicit assumption that it takes resources to investigate and prosecute a crime, and that this will limit the effective scope of the law. Prosecutorial discretion. Putting aside for the moment the (very serious) injustice that comes with the inequitable use of prosecutorial discretion, let's imagine a world without this discretion. Perhaps it's contrived, but one could imagine AI making it at least possible. Even by the book as it's currently written, is it a better world? Suddenly, an AI monitoring public activity can trigger an AI investigator to draft a warrant to be signed by an AI judge to approve the warrant and draft an opinion. One could argue that due process is had, and a record is available to the public showing that there was in fact probable cause for further investigation or even arrest. Maybe a ticket just pops out of the wall like in Demolition Man, but listing in writing clearly articulated probable cause and well-presented evidence. Investigating and prosecuting silly examples suddenly becomes possible. A CCTV camera catches someone finding a $20 bill on the street, and finds that they didn't report it on their tax return. The myriad of ways one can violate the CFAA. A passing mention of music piracy on a subway train can become an investigation and prosecution. Dilated pupils and a staggering gait could support a drug investigation. Heck, jaywalking tickets given out as though by speed camera. Who cares if the juice wasn't worth the squeeze when it's a cheap AI doing the squeezing. Is this a better world, or have we just all subjected ourselves to a life hyper-analyzed by a motivated prosecutor. Turning back in the general direction of reality, I'm aware that arguing "if we enforced all of our laws, it would be chaos" is more an indictment of our criminal justice system than it is of AI. I think that AI gives us a lens to imagine a world where we actually do that, however. And maybe thinking about it will help us build a better system.
  • yterdy 3y ago
    The software that already exists along these lines already exhibit bias against marginalized groups. I have no trouble foreseeing a filter put on the end of the spigot that exempts certain people from the inconvenience of such surveillance. Might need a new law (it'll get passed).
    • whythre 3y ago
• renegat0x0 3y ago
  The author makes one mistake. He said that Google stopped spying on gmail. - they started spying on user's gmail - there was blowback, they reverted - after some time they introduced "smart features", with ads again Link https://www.askvg.com/gmail-showing-ads-inside-email-messages-list-in-inbox-here-is-how-to-disable-them/ https://www.askvg.com/gmail-showing-ads-inside-email-message... I do not even want to check if "smart features" are opt-in, or opt-out.
  • mkesper 3y ago
    It's opt-in but hey, you're missing out if not enabling it!
• zxt_tzx 3y ago
  I tend to think the surveillance/spying distinction is a little fragile and this more a continuation of what Bruce has previously written insightfully about, i.e. the blurring of lines between private/public surveillance and, as the Snowden leaks have revealed, it's hard to keep what has been collected by private industry out of the hands of the state. However, a more recent trend is companies that sell technologies to the state directly. For every reputable one like Palantir or Anduril or even NSO Group, there are probably many more funded in the shadows by In-Q-Tel, not to mention the Chinese companies doing the same in a parallel geopolitcal orbit. Insofar as AI is a sustaining innovation that benefits incumbents, the state is surely the biggest incumbent of all. Finally, an under-appreciated point is Apple's App Tracking Transparency policy, which forbids third-party data sharing, naturally makes first-party data collection more valuable. So even if Meta or Google might suffer in the short-term, their positions are ultimately entrenched on a relative basis.
• graphe 3y ago
  >Mass surveillance fundamentally changed the nature of surveillance. Computers create and organize large amounts of information. This is useful for large organizations and unempowering to the average person. Any technology with these traits are harmful to individuals.
• CrzyLngPwd 3y ago
  More people will be criminalised, and fines will be just another tax we must pay.
• somenameforme 3y ago
  This is a political problem, not a technological one. The USSR (alongside Germany and others) managed effective at scale spying with primitive technology: paperwork for everything and every movement, informants, audio surveillance, and so on. The reason such things did not come to places like the US in the same way is not because we were incapable of such, but because there was no political interest in it. And when one looks back at the past we've banned things people would never have imagined bannable. Make it a crime to grow a plant in the privacy of your own home and then consume that plant? Sure, why not? Make it a crime for a business to have the wrong opinion when it comes to who they want to serve or hire? Sure, why not? Going the nuclear route and making the collection of data on individuals, aggregated or otherwise, illegal would hardly be some major leap of reach of jurisprudence. The problem is not that the technology exists, but that there is 0 political interest in curtailing it, and we've a 'democracy' where the will of the people matters very little in terms of what legislation gets passed.
  • tehjoker 3y ago
    COINTELPRO
  • kubb 3y ago
    In the USSR and GDR, not everyone was under constant surveillance. This would require one surveillance worker per person. There was an initial selection process.
    • rasz 3y ago
      Thats exactly how it worked. In fact there was always more than one pair of eyes on everyone, people were being coerced to snitch on each other. Im old enough to remember a nice man visiting my school asking us to listen carefully what parents talk about around the house and report to teachers any criticism of government or party. That was pre 1989 under Russian occupation of my country.
  • landemva 3y ago
    In a democracy we would have a chance to vote on individual issues such as data privacy, or war against whomever. USA is a federal republic.
• brunoTbear 3y ago
  Schneier is wrong that "hey google" is always listening. Google does on-device processing with dedicated hardware for the wake-words and only then forwards audio upstream. Believe it or not, the privacy people at Google really do try to do the right things. They don't always succeed, but they did with our hardware and wake-word listening. Am Google employee, not in hardware.
  • ajb 3y ago
    What he says is " Siri and Alexa and “Hey Google” are already always listening, the conversations just aren’t being saved yet". That's functionally what you describe. Hardware wake-word processing is a power saving feature, not a privacy enhancement. Some devices might not have enough resources to forward or store all the audio, but audio is small and extracting text does not need perfect reproduction, so it's quite likely that many devices could be reprogrammed to do it, albeit at some cost to battery life.
  • anonymousDan 3y ago
    [flagged]
• Arson9416 3y ago
  I have a friend that is working as a contractor building AI-powered workplace spying software for the explicit purpose of behavior manipulation. It gives the employees and employers feedback reports about their behavior over chat and video. For example, if they used microaggressions, misgendered someone, or said something crass. This same friend will then talk about the dangers of dystopian technology. People don't know what they're creating. Maybe it's time it bites them.
• deleted 3y ago
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• klik99 3y ago
  I don't know why this isn't being discussed more. The reality of the surveillance state is that the sheer amount of data couldn't realistically be monitored - AI very directly solves this problem by summarizing complex data. This, IMO, is the real danger of AI, at least in the short term - not a planet of paperclips, not a moral misalignment, not a media landscape bereft of creativity - but rather a tool for targeting anybody that deviates from the norm, a tool designed to give confident answers, trained on movies and the average of all our societies biases.
  • darepublic 3y ago
    An AI summary could be made of your post by cutting it off after > This, IMO, is the real danger of AI (at present) Then the following part would be condensed into emotional rhetorical metadata. It follows the rhetorical pattern , "not a, not b, not c - but d" which do in fact add some content value but more so add flavour. What it shows is that you might be a trouble maker. But also combined with other bits of data that you might be interested in the following movies and products
    • klik99 3y ago
      I can be a trouble maker and I am interested in those movies and products.
  • wahnfrieden 3y ago
    People are building that alongside/within this community, eg at Palantir, for many years now YC CEO is also ex Palantir, early employee. Another YC partner backs other invasive police surveillance tech currently. They love this stuff financially and politically.
    • matthewdgreen 3y ago
      What's different this time around is that there are multiple democratic governments pushing to block end-to-end encryption technologies, and specifically to insert AI models that will read private messages. Initially these will only be designed to search for heinous content, but the precedent is pretty worrying.
• moose44 3y ago
  Is mass spying not already going on?
  • megous 3y ago
    Mass spying, and mass killing based on it, assisted by AI.
    • 0xdeadbeefbabe 3y ago
      Mass boring with false positives.
      • willmadden 3y ago
        At first, sure. In ten or twenty years of iteration? Not so much.
  • whamlastxmas 3y ago
    There’s a difference. If they wanted to spy on me today, they’d have to look at the logs my ISP keeps into perpetuity to find my usernames on HN and then some unfortunate person has to read hundreds or thousands of comments and take extensive notes of the controversial political and social opinions that I hold. Additionally, even without ISP logs, an AI could find my accounts online by comparing my writing style and the facts of my life that get mentioned in brief passing across all my comments. It’s probably a more unique fingerprint than a lot of people realize. With an AI, someone would just have to ask with the prompt “what are the antisocial opinions of first name last name”? And it’d be instant and effectively free compared to the dozens of hours and high expense of doing it manually
    • moose44 3y ago
      Xkeyscore?
  • AlwaysRock 3y ago
    Did you read the post? The author delineates between surveillance and spying, primarily, by saying mass data collection has been happening for years. Actually doing something with that data has been more difficult. AI summarizes audio and text well, which will turn collection into actual analysis, which the author calls spying. Did you disagree?
• CrzyLngPwd 3y ago
  "has", not "will".
  • mdanger007 3y ago
    Related: https://www.mountaindew.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/MTN-DEW-RAID-QA.pdf https://www.mountaindew.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/MTN-D...
• TheLoafOfBread 3y ago
  Then people will start using AI to generate random traffic noise to fool AI watching them.
  • dbcooper 3y ago
    Of course they won't. Classic techno-libertarian fantasy.
    • TheLoafOfBread 3y ago
      Ones who want to stay hidden, will. Most of plebs won't.
      • SketchySeaBeast 3y ago
        A small group of people making noise to try and obfuscate themselves will just draw attention, won't they?
        • squarefoot 3y ago
          True, unless they use noise which is already present online to carry information, for example by applying steganography to spam.
      • Analemma_ 3y ago
        If only the people who want to stay hidden use noisetech, they stick out like a flame in a dark room and will immediately attract personalized surveillance (and maybe even retaliation merely for using it). It doesn't work unless everybody is on board.
    • ghufran_syed 3y ago
      Starting with the "classic" techno-libertarian slaves who each claimed "I am spartacus"
  • pixl97 3y ago
    [AI observer]: "Well look at this person of interest trying to fool the system, lets drop their credit score 50 points"
• pockmockchock 3y ago
  Next would be to use/create devices that are using Radio for Communication and payments, devices like Satslink as an example. It drives innovation at the same time, so I wouldn't be too concerned.
• bmislav 3y ago
  We actually recently published a research paper on exactly this topic (see https://llm-privacy.org/ https://llm-privacy.org/ for demo and paper). The paper shows that current LLMs already have the reasoning capability to infer personal attributes such as age, gender or location even when this information is not explicitly mentioned in the text. Crucially, they can do this way cheaper and way faster than humans. So I would say that spying scenarios mentioned in this blog post are definitely in the realm of possibility.
• righthand 3y ago
  Only if you continue to invest time and energy into. Not everyone puts 99% of their life online. When’s the last time you left your house to do something without a cellular? Or compromised by not ordering something you think you need?
• mmh0000 3y ago
  There's an excellent documentary on how sophisticated Government Surveillance is and how well it's tuned to be used against the general population: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120660/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120660/
• ysofunny 3y ago
  "if everybody is being spied on, nobody is being spied on" ???
• dkjaudyeqooe 3y ago
  This is why AI software must not be restricted, so that ordinary people and the civic minded can develop personal and public AI systems to counter corporate AI. The future of AI is adversarial. Now freedom to develop AI software doesn't mean freedom to use it however you please and its use should be regulated, in particular to protect individuals from things like this. But of course people cannot be trusted, so you need to be able to deploy your own countermeasures.
  • passion__desire 3y ago
    We need a new benevolent dictator of LLM Operation System (Karpathy's vision) like Yann Lecun similar to Linus Torvolds.
  • gentleman11 3y ago
    How does an adversarial ai help protect anyone's privacy or freedom to act in public in ways that big brother doesn't condone?
    • dkjaudyeqooe 3y ago
      Adversarial attacks can be made on face recognition systems and the like, defeating them, and AI models can be poisoned with adversarial data, making them defective or ineffective. As it stands, AI models are actually quite vulnerable to adversarial attacks, with no theoretical or systemic solution. In the future it's likely you'll need your own AI systems generating adversarial data to defeat models and systems that target you. These adversarial attacks will be much more effective if co-ordinated by large numbers of people who are being targeted. And of course we have no idea what's coming down the pipe, but we know that fighting fire with fire is a good strategy.
      • gentleman11 3y ago
        Yeah, that will be illegal in 10 years, if not already, under hacking or sabotage rules. Next solution?
• gboza1 3y ago
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• gboza1 3y ago
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• fsflover 3y ago
  Another ongoing discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38530795 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38530795
• indigo0086 3y ago
  "Bitcoin will enable terrorism" "Ghost guns will enable criminals to commit murder" "Social media will enable hate speech" AI will be a useful and world changing innovation which is why FUD rag articles like this will become more prevalent until it's total adoption, even by the article writer themselves
  • yonaguska 3y ago
    Do you see how the examples you posted are somewhat problematic though? Governments are actively cracking down on all of those examples- it stands to reason that they will classify AI as a dangerous tool as well at some point, as opposed it becoming a ubiquitous tool. Ghost guns are far from common at least.
    • pwillia7 3y ago
      They would ban Ghost AIs -- They need non ghost guns or you wouldn't be a State
  • beej71 3y ago
    None of your three examples are of the government using technology against its citizens.
• pier25 3y ago
  Will? I'd be surprised if NSA etc hadn't been using AI for years now.
• blondie9x 3y ago
  Real question you have to ask yourself. Is AI spying and AI law enforcement Minority Report in real life?
• sarks_nz 3y ago
  Nick Bostrom proposed the "Vulnerable World Hypothesis" which (amongst other things) says that a technology as powerful and accessible as AI requires mass surveillance to stop bad actors using it as a weapon. https://nickbostrom.com/papers/vulnerable.pdf https://nickbostrom.com/papers/vulnerable.pdf It's disturbing, but also hard (for me) to refute.
  • qup 3y ago
    Sounds like at that point we have bad actors using it as a weapon.
  • OfSanguineFire 3y ago
    I remember, in the early millennium, reading Kurzweil’s idealism about the coming singularity, and feeling similar. So much of the advanced technology that he thought will soon be in the hands of ordinary people, could be potentially so lethal that obviously the state would feel the need to restrict it. (That was one argument against Kurzweil’s vision. Another is that state regulation and licensing moves so slowly at each major technological change, that it would take us decades to get to the point he dreams of, not mere years. You aren’t going to see anything new rolled out in the healthcare sector without lots and lots of debating about it and drawing up paperwork first.)
• intended 3y ago
  If this argument hinges on summarization, then I have to ask - what is the blasted hallucination rate ? I tried exactly this. Watched 4 talks from a seminar, got them transcribed, and used ChatGPT to summarize this. Did 3 perfectly fine, and for the 4th it changed the speaker from mild mannered professor into VC investing superstar, with enough successes under his belt to not care. How do you verify your summary is correct? If your false positive rate is 25% - 33%, thats a LOT of rework. 1 out of 3.
• EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 3y ago
  Thinking of finally creating a private server for receiving emails. For sending email it is known to be very difficult, but I send very very few emails these days, will outsource it to sendgrid or similar. What's the best docker image for that, simple in configuration?
• forward1 3y ago
  Mass spying is yesterday's news. The thing we all need to worry about is behavioral management at scale, which influences politics, relationships, religions and much more. This is the true "hidden" evil behind social media and "AI" which few apprehend let alone can do something about.
• willmadden 3y ago
  This could be used to expose government and monied corruption, not just for surveilling peasants. What is the market for this short term? I think this could greatly curtail government corruption and serve as a stepping stone to AI government. It's also a cool and disruptive startup idea.
• blueyes 3y ago
  this has been true for a long time. most data is garbage, so the data collection phase of mass surveillance punched below its weight in terms of consequences felt by the surveilled. AI is one way to extraction actionable meaning from that data, and when people start feeling the everyday consequences of all that collection + meaning extraction, they will finally understand.
• boringg 3y ago
  Is this really an insight to ANYONE on hackernews? How is this article providing anything new to the conversation except to bring it back into discussion?
• godelski 3y ago
  There's a lot of speculation in the comments so I want to talk about the technology that we have __TODAY__. I post a lot about being in ML research and while my focus is on image generation I'm working with another team doing another task but not going to state it explicitly for obvious reasons. What can AI/ML do __today__? We have lots of ways to track people around a building or city. The challenge is to do these tasks through multi-camera systems. This includes things like people tracking (person with random ID but consistent across cameras), face identification (more specific representation that is independent of clothing, which usually identifies the former), gait tracking (how one walks), device tracking (based on bluetooth, wifi, and cellular). There is a lot of mixed success with these tools but I'll let you know some part that should concern you: right now these are mostly ResNet50 models, datasets are small, and they are not using advanced training techniques. That is changing. There are legal issues and datasets are becoming proprietary but the size and frequency of gathering data is growing. I'm not going to talk about social media because the metadata problem is an already well discussed one and you all have already made your decisions and we've witnessed the results of those decisions. I'm also not going to talk about China, the most surveilled country in the world, the UK, or any of that for similar reasons. We'll keep talking in general, that is invariant to country. What I will talk about is that modern ML has greatly accelerated the data gathering sector. Your threat models have changed from governments rushing to gather all the data that they can, to big companies joining the game, to now small mom and pop shops doing so. I __really__ implore you all to look at what's in that dataset[0]. There's 5B items, this tool helps retrieve based on CLIP embeddings. You might think "oh yes, Google can already do this" but the difference is that you can't download Google. Google does not give you 16.5TB of clip filtered image,text, & metadata. Or look into the RedPajama dataset[1] which has >30T tokens and 5TB of storage. With 32k tokens being about 50 pages, that's about 47 billion pages. That is, a stack of paper 5000km tall, reaching 5x the height of the ISS and is bigger than the diameter of the moon. I know we all understand that there's big data collection, but do you honestly understand how big these numbers are? I wouldn't even claim to because I cannot accurately conceptualize the size of the moon nor the distance to the ISS. They just roll into the "big" bin in my brain. Today, these systems can track you with decent accuracy even if you use basic obscurification techniques like glasses, hats, or even a surgical mask. Today we can track you not just by image, but how you walk, and can with moderate success do this through walls (meaning no camera to see if you want to know you're being tracked). Today, these systems can de-anonymize you through unique text patterns that you use (see Enron dataset, but scale). Today, these machines can uncanny valley replicas of your speech and text. Today we can make images of people that are convincingly real. Today, these tools aren't exclusive to governments or trillion dollar corporations, but available to any person that is willing to spend a few thousand dollars on compute. I don't want to paint this as a picture of doom and gloom. These tools are amazing and have the potential to do extraordinary good, at levels that would be unimaginable only a few decades ago. Even many of these tools that can invade your privacy are benefits in some ways, but just need to consider context. You cannot build a post scarce society when you require humans to monitor all stores. But like Uncle Ben says, with great power comes great responsibility. A technology that has the capacity to do tremendous good also has the power to do tremendous horrors. The choice is ours and the latter prevails when we are not open. We must ever push for these tools to be used for good, because with them we can truly do amazing things. We do not need AGI to create a post scarce world and I have no doubt that were this to become our primary goal, we could easily reach it within our lifetime without becoming a Sci-Fi dystopia and while tackling existential issues such as climate. To poke the bear a little, I'd argue that if your country wants to show dominance and superiority on the global stage, it is not done so through military power but technology. You will win the culture wars of all culture wars and whoever creates the post scarce world will be a country that will never be forgotten by time. Lift a billion people out of poverty? Try lifting 8 billion not just out of poverty, but into the lower middle class, where no child dreams of being hungry. That is something humans will never forget. So maybe this should be our cold war, not the one in the Pacific. If you're so great, truly, truly show me how superior your country/technology/people are. This is a battle that can be won by anyone at this point, not just China vs the US, but even any European power has the chance to win. [0] https://rom1504.github.io/clip-retrieval/ https://rom1504.github.io/clip-retrieval/ [1] https://github.com/togethercomputer/RedPajama-Data https://github.com/togethercomputer/RedPajama-Data
• deleted 3y ago
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• __jambo 3y ago
  Because this is so depressing I am going to try think of positive aspects: The flip side to this is the government had power because these activities required enormous resources. Perhaps it will go the other direction, if there is less of a moat other players can enter. Eg all it takes to make a state is a bunch of cheap drones and the latest government bot according to your philosophy. Maybe it means government will massively shrink in personelle? Maybe we can have a completely open source ai government/legal system. Lawyers kind of suck ethically anyway, so maybe it would be better? With low barrier to entry, we can rapidly prototype such governments and trial them on smaller populations like iceland. Such utopias will be so good everyone will move there. They still have to have physical prisons, if everyone is in prison this will be silly, but I suppose they can fine everyone, not so different from lowering wages which they already do.
• nojvek 3y ago
  It’s not that AI will enable mass spying, mass spying is already there. AI enables extracting all sorts of behavioral data across decades timespan for everyone. The devils argument is in a world where the data is not used for nefarious purposes and only to prosecute crime as passed by governments, it leads to a society where no one is above the law and equal treatment for all. However that seldom goes well since humans who control the system definitely want an upper edge.
• I_am_tiberius 3y ago
  Somewhat related: A "Tell HN" I posted today but was shadow-banned after it started trending: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38531407 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38531407
• erikerikson 3y ago
  Author: welcoming to knowing. This is unavoidable. Outside of extreme measures that will themselves mark, the network effects of use will overwhelm any effort to evade. The question I think is how too navigate and what consequences will follow. We could use these capabilities to enslave but we could also use them to free and empower. Scams rely on scale and the ineffective scaling social mechanisms to achieve profit. Imagine if the first identification of a scam informed every potential mark to which the scam began to be applied. Don't forget to concern yourself with false positives too, of course. The injustice of being unable to take action in disputes due to a lack of evidence would evaporate. Massive privacy, consent, and security risks and issues result so will we be ready to properly protect and honor people and their freedoms? At the end of this path may lay more efficient markets; increased capital flows and volumes; and a more fair, just, equitable, and maximized world more filled with joy, love, and happiness. There are other worse options of course.
• mullingitover 3y ago
  This kind of thing will probably never fly, because Americans expect that they can break the law and in most cases will not suffer any consequences. Anything that threatens this would be, in their eyes, oppression. Imagine if you immediately got a text informing you of your $300 speeding ticket within a few seconds of you going a mile per hour over. People would riot. However, Americans expect that the law is enforced vigorously upon other people, especially people they hate. If AI enabled immediate immigration enforcement on undocumented migrants, large portions of the population would injure themselves running to the voting booth to have it added to the Constitution. It's the whole expectation that for my group the law protects but does not bind, and for others it binds but does not protect.
  • repentless_ape 3y ago
    Yeah this is all uniquely American and not prevalent in every society on earth throughout all of human history.
    • pixl97 3y ago
      https://crookedtimber.org/2018/03/21/liberals-against-progressives/#comment-729288 https://crookedtimber.org/2018/03/21/liberals-against-progre... >For millennia, conservatism had no name, because no other model of polity had ever been proposed. “The king can do no wrong.” In practice, this immunity was always extended to the king’s friends, however fungible a group they might have been. Today, we still have the king’s friends even where there is no king (dictator, etc.). Another way to look at this is that the king is a faction, rather than an individual.
• wseqyrku 3y ago
  So far you were a line in the log. Now someone is actually looking at you with three eyes.
• FrustratedMonky 3y ago
  This very scenario was one of the key threats in book Homo Dues and that was over 5 years ago. Russia could do surveillance, but was limited by manpower. Now AI solves this, there can be an AI bot dedicated to each individual. Wasn't there another article on HN just day, that Car Makers, Phone, Health monitors all can now aggregate data to know 'your mood' when in an accident? To know where you are going, how you are feeling? This is the real danger with AI. Even current technology is good enough for this kind of surveillance.
• uticus 3y ago
  This sums up so many things well and clearly. It's so quotable. - The money trail: "Their true customers—their advertisers—will demand it." - The current state of affairs: "Surveillance has become the business model of the internet..." - The fact that not participating, or opting-out, still yields informational value, if not even more so: "Find me all the pairs of phones that were moving toward each other, turned themselves off..." This isn't a technological problem. Technology always precedes the morals and piggybacks on the fuzzy ideas that haven't yet developed into concrete, well-taught axioms. It is a problem about how our society approaches ideals. Ideals, not ideas. What do we value? What do we love? If we love perceived security more than responsibility, we will give up freedoms. And gladly. If we love ourselves more than future generations, we will make short-sighted decisions and pat ourselves on the back for our efficiency in rewarding ourselves. If we love ourselves more than others, we won't even care much about social concerns. We'll fail to notice anything that doesn't move the needle against my comfort much. It's more understandable to me than ever how recent human horrors - genocides, repressive regimes, all of it - came about to be. It's because I'm a very selfish person and I am surrounded by selfish people. Mass spying is a symptom - not much of a cause - of the human condition.
• miki123211 3y ago
  I personally find the censorship implications (and the business models they allow) far more worrying than the surveillance implications. It will soon be possible to create a dating app where chatting is free, but figuring out a place to meet or exchanging contact details requires you to pay up, in a way that 99% of people won't know how to bypass, especially if repeated bypassing attempts result in a ban. Same goes for apps like Airbnb or eBay, which will be able to prevent people from using them as listing sites and conducting their transactions off-platform to avoid fees. The social media implications are even more worrying, it will be possible to check every post, comment, message, photo or video and immediately delist it if it promotes certain views (like the lab leak theory), no matter how indirect these mentions are. Parental control software will have a field day with this, basically redefining helicopter parenting.
• elric 3y ago
  We can barely get people to care about the implications of types of surveillance that they do understand (CCTV everywhere, Snowden's revelations, etc). It's going to be nigh impossible to get people to care about this enough to make a difference. Heck, even if they did care, there's nothing they can realistically do about it. The genie's out of the bottle.
• barelyauser 3y ago
  The average HN user defends the "common guy" or "the masses", perhaps because he fears being perceived as condescending. I've come to the conclusion that the masses don't deserve any of this. Many drink and drive, indulge in destructive addictions (not only to themselves). Many can't bother recycling or even maintaining a clean home environment, waste time and resources in every activity they engage in and don't even care for their neighbors well being (loud music, etc). Concluding remarks. As man succeeded in creating high mechanical precision from the chaotic natural environment, he will succeed in creating a superior artificial entity. This entity shall "spy" (better described as "care" for) every human being, maximizing our happiness.
• WD40forRust42 3y ago
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• aaroninsf 3y ago
  "This is a political problem..." No. The US has always had political problems wrt surveillance; and many places have had much worse ones. Now, all of us can anticipate a very different, all but inevitable, and very much worse political problem. AI is a force multiplier and an accelerant. As such it is a problem, an obvious one, and a very very big one. This is just one of many ways in which force multiplication and acceleration, so pursued, and so lauded, in so many domains, may work their magic on preexisting social and political evils. And give us brand new ones, per Larkin.
• thesz 3y ago
  AIs, LLMs in patricular, go in one direction, just like humans usually do. What other humans do to cicumvent that? Yes, they found a way to alternate direction, in case of London cockney, by using rhymes [1]. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/education/2014/jun/09/guide-to-cockney-rhyming-slang https://www.theguardian.com/education/2014/jun/09/guide-to-c... If you need to fool your AI of choice, rhyme the concepts! For a demo, ask your AI of choice about "Does basin of gravy likes satin and silk?" (decode yourself) The article above is from 2014 and is hardly is used when I asked questions using Cockney parlance. You are welcome. ;)